CIVIL INVESTIGATION REPORT .02

The list of people targeted by digital espionage is growing. Don Mattia Ferrari, chaplain aboard of Mediterranea Saving Humans, was also notified by Meta about a ‘sophisticated government-backed” targeting in February 2024.

The threat message received by Don Mattia is similar to the one received by Luca Casarini and was sent by Meta on the same day, February 8, 2024. 

Specifically, Meta's Adversarial Threat Report, published in February 2024, reported that the company had detected and attempted to thwart the operations of several spyware programs used by the paid surveillance industry to target people around the world. Meta discovered the spyware operations of eight companies in Italy, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates that provide their technologies to government agencies. Meta reported various technologies, including malware capable of performing operations to collect and access device information, location, photos and media content, contacts, calendar, email, SMS, Telegram, Skype, Viber, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, WhatsApp, and operations to activate microphone, camera, and screenshot functions. 

John Scott Railton, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, told us that "being alerted to a government-sponsored attack indicates that the person has likely been selected for surveillance using advanced capabilities. In our experience, this raises the possibility that other people in their network of contacts may also have been targeted. This meta-alert is very helpful in suggesting that there may be a larger problem, more technologies at play, and more cases that now need to be investigated.

The fact that the targeting of Don Mattia occurred at the same time as the communication to Luca Casarini suggests that they may have been targeted as part of the same "group". This also raises the troubling possibility that people other than those currently known to the public were targeted, and that multiple technologies were used as part of the same surveillance operation.

Given the multiple types of alerts we've received from people working on similar issues (WhatsApp alerts and Meta alerts), we want to point here to Meta's research on the commercial surveillance ecosystem, which highlights the discovery of multiple spying technologies that are part of a "surveillance chain" that includes "reconnaissance, engagement, and exploitation." We should begin to wonder exactly what technologies may have been used as part of the government spying operations whose existence we are revealing.

Let us remember that Fr. Mattia is not working in a purely individual capacity, but in full communion and harmony with the ecclesiastical authorities who have jurisdiction over these matters, as the Pastors of the Church have repeatedly stated.